Hotmail development team on Reddit(reddit.com) |
Hotmail development team on Reddit(reddit.com) |
That is so incredibly insulting. If you go help in an aid program in Africa for a while, you could come home to find 10 years of email deleted. Who would stay with an email service that does that? Microsoft just doesn't get that users want to be happy. Are the $ savings MS gets from disk space of old deleted emails really that important?
Edit: Maybe this is a feature Facebook should implement. They ask for your Hotmail login and password anyway, they may as well say "Microsoft will delete your emails! But don't worry, we'll save them for you". Maybe then MS would take a hint and remove the "delete user's email now" code.
It was unbelievable to me then that they would delete your email after 30 (?) days of inactivity, and it's unbelievable to me now, especially after Gmail changed the game for them in 2004 by essentially saying that diskspace is a commodity and you can therefore store as much as you want with them (within reason) for as long as you want.
Sure, there are things in the ToS that cover Google's ass, but no Google engineer in his right mind would write code that automatically deletes someone's email after a predetermined (way too short) time period. There would be too many alarm bells going off in their head, they'd talk about it with the team, and they'd make the right call. Something tells me that with Hotmail, it was just an exec somewhere looking at a balance sheet and trickling an order down the waterfall so the revenue looks nicer.
Jaded, but goddamnit.
Sorry, I may not have explained this very clearly: Exchange was crashing because it held too much mail. I have no idea how many terrabytes were involved, but there fewer than 10,000 employees at the time.
I know everyone is going to say that Exchange and Hotmail are completely different code bases, but what they have in common is Microsoft's vision of what people do with email and how they do it. I'd say that deleting old mail is in Microsoft's DNA.
I haven't been able to find a customer for it but I love using it.
But the point is "Don't throw away all that old email, put it in a database so you can search over 100,000 messages for just a few results to look at".
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en-GB/program_policies...
However I'm not clear if they have it automatically delete it after 9 months regardless of the activity or if there are other conditions that factor into this.
The whole deleting emails is a bad experience though. Just another reason to back up important files.
WHAT?! They do that? That's SO dangerous, and perhaps what made me lose a domain name three years ago! I registered a domain in 2001 with my hotmail account, and noticed in 2006 that the registration had changed to another person in Ontaio, Canada. My only guess as to how they did that (after much investigation) was that they must have accessed my hotmail account, which was dormant for probably three years (but was the account I used with my registrar). I couldn't figure out how they got into my email, and I eventually gave up the fight and got a new domain name. Now I'm waiting out the expiration on the first one, hoping I can get it back.
Do they ACTUALLY recycle usernames? Is THAT how I lost my domain name?! Someone just registered my old hotmail account back, and then probably "lost password" to the account? Fuck that makes me so mad. There's no way MS does this...does anyone know?
I suspect a more reasonable rule is that you have to log in or download email at least once 60 days after creation or the account get's deleted in one year.
So I doubt it's for usernames.
That is more insulting.
We have Internet here so you can check your mail.
Sure, there's Internet all over Africa. It's one of the most connected continents, at least with mobile. But people going on programs there, from the West, typically don't get to access the Internet much. This is not a reflection on access to the internet there, but a reflection on how the Field Study students spend their time and money.
Please don't read into things that I said and be insulted by them. I meant nothing about how well Africa is connected, and I most certainly did mean to insult anyone.
I've had friends spend weeks on trips to rural Sierra Leone, and guess what? There's no running water, much less Internet access.
That's not the same as saying wherever you live in Africa has no modern facilities including the Internet.
What's also horrible about the yahoo policy is that there is that you can reactive the account (at least for some period of time), but the email archives are deleted. This happened to one of my accounts.
Maybe they're using the same message store?
I think that reliance on Exchange is a huge mistake.
The Devs said "we’d love your feedback", and when people say "please don't ever delete my email", the response is basically "too bad, you have 270 days". It's insulting.
I expect many people to be able to completely ignore their email for a year simply because they have nothing to send and then come back to it. Standard person != tech freak.
9 months is just what it takes to make a baby.
I personally log into Hotmail twice a year, specifically to ensure that my account does not get deleted. I have enough things from my past that may or may not try to send me an email at my @hotmail.com address (or require it to get back in to their service) that it's just to risky to lose it.
I have worked with Site Server 3 in the late 90's and I can assure you no sane developer would have created such a monstrosity. That was, probably, the work of a marketer.
We haven't implemented imap since based on the user feedback and usage data, there isn't a large enough need when you look at the other protocols we provide. for mobile - we believe activesync is the best story. it gives you mail, calendar, and contacts. there is big adoption of the protocol here with android, iphone, and windows mobile. for clients - with the outlook connector, windows live mail client, and pop3, we cover the majority of client scenarios. there are definitely some gaps, but not enough to outweigh the cost. one of the tough trade offs we make. let me know if that doesn't answer the question. -ryan"
Now, which one is the chicken and which one is the egg?
Combine this with the fact that Outlook is just terrible with IMAP, and I didn't find too many regular users who liked it.
Personally, I wouldn't use anything else, of course.
The questions I had asked was (summarized): Most IE6 usage seems to be from large corps, and much of their resistance to upgrading is due to internal apps which only work correctly on IE6. Why doesn't Microsoft offer a standalone IE6 distro which could be installed alongside IE8/9 and used for the few apps holding back company-wide upgrades?
They just keep getting defensive about their decisions of deleting peoples email, not supporting IMAP etc.
I've read the name "Hotmail" more times today than I had in the past 6 months.
I think the Hotmail team shouldn't have done this, at least not before putting all the basic features in place.
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_te...
Which is not necessarily a bad thing to do IMO.
When I saw that they mentioned ActiveSync, all I could think of was "I'd have to plug my phone into my computer to get email???" I didn't know that's what they call their push service now.
It messed me up, as I lost lot of info; I decided not to use it again, even though I was happy with the experience (light Email user). I moved to gmail by begging random users to send me an invite. I was amazed with the storage and also with the experience and I still use the same inbox to that day.
Not sure how much cash would be involved in that acquisition, but @html.com would be a cool rebrand that I think tech-minded people would appreciate.
They're clueless, that's why they're getting downvoted. Re: their complete and utter cluelessness when it comes to IMAP support, someone basically summarized up the reasoning in a single sentence, that the Hotmail team hasn't realized in years of managing this product:
"ActiveSync? srsly? Does it work with my Android phone? With an iPhone? With anything else than Windows?"
EAS is a protocol specifically for mobile phones, and Android, iPhone, Palm all support it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Exchange_ActiveSy...
its 270 day expiration for gmail, I believe.
not sure for others
From the original post:
> tl;dr: Hotmail engineers and product managers want to discuss email from 12-3 PST today.
To those who know something about IE6's "architecture": How hard is such an idea given that you are Microsoft? What if the standalone app could be constrained to work only with known-safe websites so that security upgrades were not so essential?
They are now atoning for past sins. I don't think they understood what a pickle they were getting themselves into a few years ago by saying, "Our in-house apps target IE6, our corporate standard browser". Also, they have vendor contracts which do not state, "We guarantee isolated product upgrades to support Microsoft's current browser" or similar. This isn't to say that they shouldn't have been more forward looking -- it's just the reality of the situation.
>>Does it work on my ubuntu laptop?
Dear iamnotobama - You may be surprised to hear that it actually does work on your laptop. It's a three-step process: 1.Install Windows 7 2.Install IE9, and 3.Enjoy the Beauty of the Web. ☺
And, forgive me, but how are their responses bad? In particular, I found their response to why IE doesn't do silent updates to be incredibly acceptable! (not to mention if any browser were to pull a stunt like auto, silent updates, they'd be assaulted more, to no end)
"One of our principles with Internet Explorer and Windows is user choice; this shows up in many places including our approach to updates. We believe users are in the best position to make decisions about what software they want to run. IE is the most widely used browser including being the most trusted and widely used browser with businesses.
As you can imagine a hospital with a multimillion dollar patient tracking web based application doesn't want a silent or automatic upgrade to their browser that could in fact jeopardize their patient's safety. For consumers, we have Windows update which provides a simple notification that a new version of the browser is available and lets the user choose to install or not. Again, customer choice is our overriding principle." (from link)
Also, a question: what would you have wanted them to say? "No, because we'd get in trouble"? Or, "This is the situation. Because of this, we say no".
Great question!
At reddit, we are committed to quality comment criticism. Before the release of this criticism we leveraged Rich Internet Applications to survey our users' core requirements in order to provide the best comment reading experience for our users. I'm pleased to announce that our latest criticism will have full support for immersive webrage typing and HW accelerated upvote/downvote technology.
-Lars
(Seriously, check out this summary of their fabulously well constructed non-answers and evasive bullshit: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_memb... )
EDIT: Sorry. I take it back, I just read this:
---------8<---------
iamnotobama writes:
Does it work on my ubuntu laptop?
1. Install Windows 7
2. Install IE9, and
3. Enjoy the Beauty of the Web.Anyway, hopefully they at least let you do pop without removing the message from your inbox.
The "Leave Mail" option is very important as well, especially when they really just want to leave the mail on the server long enough to get it on multiple devices (especially their main desktop), but the server has absurd size caps.
It's often a case of their expectations having already been set by their history with POP3, so anything working different is not what they want.
you can turn off the page you see before the inbox if you want by going to options. many people like this because they see highlights of your inbox / networks in one spot. but understand if you don't -we often default logout to MSN since that's where many users come from. However this is something that we always look at.
Guys, if your market it people who go to MSN to find the link to their email or through Outlook you shouldn't be surprised that the people of reddit don't like your product.
I've also already experienced both situations. When the @live.com accounts became available I registered my name, never used it, eventually forgot to keep logging in to keep it active and it got deleted. Meanwhile, the account I use for xbox live stayed active even though I hadn't logged in to hotmail in at least 2 years until a couple weeks ago.
Why? That seems horribly broken.
There are many people who make event specific emails addresses. These events are annual, so they use the email yearly.
Additionally, they should not delete any existing mail, but instead move all new mail at that point to spam, which I think gets deleted in one month.
This way you never lose anything you actually know about. And you have recent email just sent to you. The cost of this should be very low.
For IE9 we really focused on what customers, partners and developers told us mattered most, their sites. Developers wanted the ability to create richer and more immersive experiences on the web, and so we invested in fully HW accelerating HTML5 through Windows.
* Why no Websockets support?
We started by building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites and what web APIs they used. In IE9, we set out to support the standards that showed up among those sites. We also spoke to developers and partners to understand what they were going do in the future and what they couldn't do today
... every answer is like this.
For IE9 we really focused on what customers, partners and developers told us mattered most, their sites. Developers wanted the ability to create richer and more immersive experiences on the web, and so we invested in fully HW accelerating HTML5 through Windows.
Dev translation: we actually tested this. People didn't care enough about built-in spellcheck.
We started by building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites and what web APIs they used. In IE9, we set out to support the standards that showed up among those sites. We also spoke to developers and partners to understand what they were going do in the future and what they couldn't do today
I don't even have anything to add to this. They looked at who's using websockets and the standard. No one is using it. In fact, I don't see why IE is getting a bad rap for this -- none of the browsers currently have websockets enabled while the standard is being fixed. The rest of their comment is marketing-translated: "We do care about standards though, which is why we implemented the more common ones."
There a lots of pieces of 3rd party software that mess around with IE in ways that MS have claimed are not possible and go part of the way towards what you want:
Uninstall IE from Windows: http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html
Have multiple stand-alone versions if IE installed: http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE, http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage, http://blog.donavon.com/2009/08/run-ie6-ie7-and-ie8-side-by-...
Virtualise your way out - run different versions of IE in VM's: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=...
Once you can run multiple versions of IE on the same machine, and you're controlling which browsers are installed, redirecting traffic to one or the other is just matter of a simple browser plugin on both that has a black/whitelist and redirects to the appropriate browser. Done. Ms could get an intern to code this up, if they actually wanted to.
"Also, their revenue model only works if they can keep selling you upgrades all the time"
I think the need for IE6 hurts the velocity of Windows 7 upgrades, especially for large accounts.
During the trial, I think they argued both of the above, amongst other things. However, I'm fairly sure that's water under the bridge at this point. I would assume it's just not judged cost effective to work on decade old junk, nor to give it credence or attention by doing so.
If you talk to users, very few will care that IE doesn't support key web standards that every other major browser does, because everyone is going to make things work on IE anyways. However if you talk to users, lots care that it is easy to develop rich web content. However the users don't have the perspective to understand that standards support will get them better web content.
Therefore IE decides that better standards support is not a priority. And doesn't implement it.
Conversely if IE did decide to implement better standards support, everyone would be better off.
However Microsoft wouldn't get much credit for it, because it wouldn't be obvious to users how important Microsoft's role was in making things better. And developers would say, "Finally!" But then curse Microsoft for years anyways because it takes that long to get the old, broken, browsers off of the market.
The result? IE is crap. And will remain crap. Indefinitely. And Microsoft is convinced that this is not a problem. (And for them it isn't - except for the also invisible problem that they have developed hiring problems in part because many good developers can't stand that attitude.)
What I intended to communicate was that the incompetence applies to Microsoft as a whole. There's plenty of brilliant and competent individuals who work at Microsoft.
Email should be kept forever. I meant if you don't log in for a year they can delete the account.
Data storage is ludicrously cheap that I don't understand why there's a need at all.
Drop Box reserves the right to delete free accounts after just 90 days. Is that unreasonable? Hell no. I bet they don't hold your stuff forever in case you do pay that overdue bill one day too.